M O D E R N S C H O O L I N S T I T U T I O N

A N D E D U C A T I O N A L W R I T I N G

JUS T I N O MA GA L HÃ E S

justinomagalhaes@ie.ulisboa.pt | Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal

A B S T R A C T

The modern school institution has shaped the education-institution. The construction

and institutionalisation of the school have reflected institutional representation and

modelling. School configurations have included symbology, materiality, curriculum,

standards and pedagogy. Written culture, as the rational, method and order in the way

of thinking and acting, has given support and meaning to the institutional representation

of education and the school. It has enabled institutional schooling to correspond to

education-institution in the modernisation of western society and within the context of

the main reform movements. School reforms were changes in education. This essay

presents a summary of the history of the educational institution and the representation

of school. The structure of basic education accompanied the vernacular and was

institutionalised through primary school. Secondary schooling was rooted in collegial

tradition. It benefited from the Enlightenment Reforms of Minor Studies and the

curriculum adjustment to new lettered profiles of the industrial revolution and the

modernisation of public administration. Institutionalist theories are taken as the main

epistemic framework.

K E Y W O R D S

Education-institution; School institution; Institutional schooling;

Educational writing; Secondary education.

1 Translated by Twintone (funded by FCT–Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia within the scope of the

contract UID/CED/04107/2016 to UIDEF–Unidade de Investigação e Desenvolvimento em Educação e

Formação).

2 Indeed, this is one of the aspects that Roger Chartier stresses in the Avant-Propos a La Société des Individus,

of Norbert Elias (1991).

3 Norbert Elias, with reference to the contemporary period, believed it was possible to distinguish between a

national habitus and identity on the one hand, and integration in central humanitarian organisations on the other,

such as the UN, by influencing the “social habitus” with rationality means.

4 The full title of the work is: Universal School of Literature and Arithmetics which is dedicated to the Angelic

Doctor, Santo Tomas de Aquino (Fifth Dr, of the Church) Diego Bueno Examinor of Maestros in Zaragoza.

5 Written in French, this book was first published in Amsterdam in 1715, without consulting Fénelon. From then

on, the book was translated and adapted for other languages and became part of the school bibliography up to the

school Reforms following the First World War.

6 Georges Snyders produced a historical and pedagogical synthesis of the birth of the traditional school, however it is

not possible to elaborate on its fundamental arguments here. The meaning of the modern school institution is the object

of study of Louis Marin, in which the boarding school is one of the subjects referred to (Marin, 1975, pp. 205 ff.).

7 The synthesis on the history of the human spirit retrieves Turgot, in Encyclopedia. This work was only published

in 1795, after Condorcet had already been arrested and sentenced to death.

8 In the second half of the eighteenth century, the German language adopted the term Geschite, which covered

both the narrative and the event (see Koselleck, 2005).

9 It is not possible to develop the issue of educational writing here. My detailed analysis may be found in

Magalhães (2010).